Global hiring for software and SaaS companies

Quick answers

The five questions software leadership teams ask first.

Why software and SaaS companies employ across borders

The reasons are structural, not fashionable.

The talent is not where you are. Senior backend, platform, security and machine learning engineers are scarce in every major hub at once. Poland, Portugal, India, Vietnam and Brazil hold deep pools of engineers who have shipped production systems for years.

Support has to follow the sun. Once you sell to enterprises across regions, a support and reliability rota covering three time zones stops being optional, and you cannot build one out of a single office.

Cost structure matters again. Boards look at gross margin, not headcount. Building the same capability at a lower fully loaded cost is one of the few levers that does not damage the product. A country that looks cheap on salary can be mid table once contributions are counted.

Expansion needs local presence. Enterprise buyers in Germany, Japan or Brazil want a seller in their language and time zone, an implementation lead who can be on site, and often a local counterparty to contract with.

Acquisitions arrive distributed. Buy a product team and you inherit whatever they built, often contractors across five countries with inconsistent IP assignment. Regularising that before the next diligence is a common reason companies call an EOR provider.

The roles and where they sit

Not every role belongs in every market. Each links to its country guide.

Hiring routes compared

The routes differ on what software companies care about: speed, whether your IP is safe, and whether the person can hold equity.

What a global software hire actually costs

These are illustrative planning figures, not quoted rates and not statutory percentages for any country. Real numbers depend on the market, the salary and the ceilings that apply.

Worked example, illustrative only. A senior backend engineer in an EU market on €75,000 gross, with a 22% contribution load and 2% in mandatory benefits, costs roughly €93,000. Add the EOR fee and equipment and you are planning around €100,000 fully loaded.

The five traps that catch software companies

These are the failures we get called in to fix. All are expensive once they have run for a year.

1. IP assignment does not travel

US employment agreements lean on work made for hire, which assigns employee created work to the company automatically. That is US copyright law, not a universal rule. Many civil law jurisdictions vest copyright in the author at creation and recognise a transfer only through a specific written assignment, sometimes requiring the work, territory and consideration to be stated. Several also grant employee inventors extra compensation for patentable inventions, and moral rights often cannot be assigned, only waived. So if your engineer signed your standard US template, your ownership of their code may be weaker than your cap table assumes. The fix is a locally drafted contract with a jurisdiction specific assignment clause or deed.

2. Stock options behave differently in every country

Three questions decide everything. When does tax arise: grant, vest or exercise? What kind of income is it: employment income at marginal rates with contributions attached, or a capital gain? And who collects it, the employee or you through payroll withholding? Where tax lands at vest, an employee in a private company owes cash on shares they cannot sell, which turns a retention tool into a grievance. Where the gain is employment income, employer contributions can attach, so the plan quietly raises payroll cost. Some markets offer favourable qualified regimes if you meet conditions on grant price and holding period, and withdraw them if you do not. The workable answer is one global plan with country sub plans, RSUs where options are punitive, and cash incentives where equity does not work.

3. Engineer misclassification is the highest risk profile there is

Every classification test looks at the same substance: control, integration, exclusivity and who carries commercial risk. A full time engineer fails all four. They attend your standups, take direction from your engineering manager, use your repositories, have no other clients and bear none of the delivery risk. The consequences are retrospective: back contributions and payroll tax for the whole period, interest and penalties, and in many countries the leave, notice and severance the person should have had throughout. Some jurisdictions add criminal exposure for deliberate evasion. It also weakens your IP position, because a dispute about status invites a dispute about ownership.

4. A salesperson abroad can create a taxable presence

Permanent establishment decides whether your company becomes taxable in a country where it has no entity. For software companies the trigger is commercial, not technical. A remote engineer writing code for a foreign parent is usually low risk. A salesperson who negotiates terms, agrees pricing or habitually concludes contracts in your name is the classic dependent agent case, and modern treaty language catches anyone playing the principal role in getting a deal signed, even when the signature happens elsewhere. The exposure is corporate tax on the profits attributed to that activity, plus registrations, filings and penalties. An EOR reduces the risk for non closing roles, but not for someone functionally closing deals in country.

5. Data residency and GDPR reach your engineers

If your product holds personal data about people in the EU or the UK, an engineer with production access is processing that data wherever they sit. That brings obligations by design: a lawful basis, a valid transfer mechanism when data leaves the region, documented processing, and contractual controls flowing down to everyone who touches it. Employee data is protected too, and several jurisdictions restrict staff monitoring far more tightly than the US does, including productivity tracking and access logging beyond what the role requires. Some regulated verticals add residency rules keeping data in country, which constrains where an engineer with production access can sit at all.

Where to hire, country by country

Every market below has a full country guide covering costs, payroll, leave and termination.

How Dryft works with software companies

1. Shortlist on total cost, not salary. Give us the role, seniority and time zone. You get a modelled fully loaded cost across three or four countries.
2. Pick the route per country. EOR while you are small or still testing, your own entity where the team is durable. We say so when the entity is better.
3. Get IP and equity right in the contract. Local terms carry jurisdiction appropriate assignment language, and we flag inventor compensation and moral rights before the offer.
4. Onboard in days. Offer, local contract, registrations, benefits enrolment, payroll setup and equipment run in parallel.
5. Run payroll monthly. Global payroll, contributions, filings, leave, local payslips, one invoice across every country.
6. Convert contractors and acquired teams. We audit existing arrangements for classification and IP risk, then move the people who should be employees.
7. Hand over when it is time. When a country outgrows the EOR we transfer the employment to your entity. Recruiting and managed teams sit on the same infrastructure.

FAQ

This guide is general information, not legal, tax or immigration advice. Every cost figure here is an illustrative planning range, not a quoted rate for any country. Rules differ by jurisdiction and change regularly. Confirm the position for your countries with a qualified adviser before acting. Last reviewed September 2026.